Welcome to Safety Week 2012, the one week out of the entire year devoted exclusively to the topic of Safety in the workshop. If this is your first Safety Week, please feel free to revisit previous topics from years past.

Safety Week was the brain child of Marc Spagnuolo years ago, so be sure to visit his website The Wood Whisperer to find all of his videos and links this week, and there you’ll also find a number of links to the various bloggers and podcasters taking part in the event.

In previous years we’ve covered a wide variety of topics from Dust Dangers to Excessive Noise and of course we’ve talked about Tool Safety and Best Practices, all with the hopes of educating ourselves and our fellow woodworkers on things we just might take for granted or worse yet simply neglect.

By no means what-so-ever is Safety Week meant as a way to put people down for past mistakes or misunderstandings. What you’ll find in the coming days, and in shows from years past, are lessons sometimes learned the hard way. The pictures, videos and in some cases testimonials won’t always be pleasant to read but they’re a great reminder of what can happen in a matter of seconds. But that doesn’t mean Safety topics can’t be approached with a sense of humor either, and you’ll find that here too.

If there’s one lesson to be learned this week, it should be that Safety is a topic no one will ever fully appreciate until something happens in the shop to remind them of its importance. We all have close calls at some point in our shop life, in the end, hopefully that’s all it’ll be a CLOSE CALL vs. an EMERGENCY CALL.

To get things started off this week, I invite you to visit Safety Weeks from years past here at Matt’s Basement Workshop by visiting our “Safety Week” page by Clicking Here. Here you’ll find every every show and article I’ve posted during Safety Weeks all the way back to 2008.

I plan on reposting a few of these as the week goes on and look for a new video on Wednesday, if you listened to the latest Wood Talk Online Radio, you may have heard a little sneak peek on the topic.

Comments (2)

After watching your safety video (good job, BTW, and thanks for sharing that), I ran into a couple you might like. First is similar to your router incident, except the guy is trying to show why you don’t use the wrong tool on a lathe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOhHeyoZLaY. The second is again the misuse of a tool, but done for (hopefully) entertainment value: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4qB6n1cm04. On that one, the title (“Crazy Canadian”) says it all. Done … I hope … for yuks, it makes me wonder how many will actually TRY it.

Thanks for the links, I haven’t had a chance to check them out yet but I have heard of the Crazy Canadian! I’m under the impression he’s a bit of a “Super Dave”…danger for a laugh, but a lesson in the end? Hopefully the lathe video won’t scare me away from turning LOL.